Online Marketing Blog

I received an invite to CrowdFactory’s “Driving Social Media & Customer Acquisition Throughout the Customer Lifecycle” webinar yesterday with Jeremiah Owyang from Altimeter Group and  Sanjay Dholakia, CEO of CrowdFactory and decided to liveblog it.

Jeremiah has pioneered a lot of the social media thinking found in progressive companies today and his blog, Web Strategist, is known to senior business and agency marketing executives world-wide. I’ve been reading it for many years. This webinar addressed several key issues from a social engagement and commerce perspective and promised to share how marketers are using social media to engage customers and prospects across the entire lifecycle.

Recently I was invited to give a basics webinar on optimizing news content  for search.  The intersection of search and PR/communications are obviously something quite familiar and while I’ve done several such presentations with our client PRWeb, I had not done one with Search Engine Watch before.

The outcome exceeded all expectations thanks to the excellent promotions by PRWeb and SEW plus Mike Grehan’s smooth handling of moderator duties amidst technical difficulties. Over 7,000 people registered, there were over 400 questions and 650 Tweets using the #prweb hash tag during the webinar.

The way it goes with many webinars when you’re invited by an organization to participate, is that the topic and title/description are determined beforehand. The speaker adapts themselves to that.  This presentation content focused on optimizing writing for the web with a particular emphasis on optimizing content common to public relations.

Today we’re doing a webinar (2:00 pm EST) with PRWeb on the topic of leveraging search engine optimization and news content for improved search engine marketing performance.  Registrations for this webinar were capped at 2,500, so if you didn’t make it in time, please visit the comments for this post as we’re contining the conversation there after the webinar.

The bottom line for the presentation is that there are opportunities to gain advantage from optimizing content according to it’s purpose or goals. In the case of news content, make it easy for consumers and journalists alike to find your message on the channels and in the format they prefer. That means understanding the difference in search behaviors for consumers vs journalists and analysts doing research on companies/individuals.

Chris Sherman is doing another Search Marketing Now Webcast tomorrow at 1PM EST on “Measuring Search Success“. This is a free event sponsored by our friends at ClickTracks.

You’ll learn:

• How to recognize a successful search strategy
• How to fine tune your current marketing efforts
• Which analytics tools can save you time and money

Chris is without question, one of the most knowledgeable people in the search marketing industry, so sitting in on this webinar is a no-brainer.

SEMPO is running their State of the Search Marketing Industry survey again and I would encourage anyone working in the field to take a few minutes and fill it out. The survey provides excellent insight into the direction of search marketing budgets, tactics and trends.¬† I know I’m curious to see how it compares to the Marketing Sherpa Benchmark Guide 2007 data.

Also, there’s a giveaway for those of you that need that kind of incentive.¬† “As a thank you to everyone who participates in the survey, each respondent will be eligible to win one free full-conference pass to any Search Engine Strategies (SES) event in 2007.” SES conferences passes are in the range of $1200-$1500 so that is a nice prize.